I just had an idea. If anyone does visit an affected beach, take small samples of the beach water, the wet sand, and any oil you find and send them to
a non-profit environmental group, such as WWF or Greenpeace. Their biologists and chemists can see what the toxicity levels of oil and chemicals are
in the water and ground.

No but seriously, I've been around the Texas/Louisiana coastal area a lot for the past few weeks. If you drive across the border and keep going for
about half an hour, you can smell it. And that's just a few miles inland. :s

(I recommend acquiring a gas mask w/goggles, and full body jumpsuit in case of hurricane/rain/winds)

These people would gladly come and work the beaches and marshes to help clean it up.

Seems to me there's lots of complaints but no one is in their car driving to Gulf Coast to help. I seen plenty of people going down to assist after
Katrina?

I have already begun an effort here on Eastcoast of Canada to be ready when the Gulf Stream gets ahold of this Catastrophe and sends it up the coast/.
I also seen that South Carolina is gearing up for it as well.

Originally posted by hawkiye
The government is worthless! People need to just start doing it themselves. All the farmers in the area that have extra hay and straw need to just
start taking down to the docks and the fishermen start taking it out and sopping up the oil. Also all the marshes they are so worried about just start
putting hay and straw in there and sopping up the oil.

Someone should set up a website and start recruiting people to ship thier hay down there and people with boats etc. to take out and soak up oil with
it. At least if it washes up on the beach it will be easy to pick up just like sea weed.

If we want this cleaned up we the people are going to have to do it and by-pass the incompetent worthless government. If I lived anywhere near the
area I would load up a pick up and trailer with hay and head for those marshes and just start doing it and maybe get some news outlets to cover it and
start the ball rolling and hope it caught on.

Ok so anyone live near there want to get the ball rolling?

Then get promptly arrested for for polluting the enviroment with dumping straw in the sea, and get put away for years ! Yep, surely the way to
go.............................However with due respect it is Naieve to think that we can mop this up, no matter how many of us could try, there is no
way we would even make a dent in this. I have never been a believer in the Anti-Christ being Obama, but if he ends up as the one responsible for
completly destroying the oceans, then by default, he has been the one spoken of. This fragile Blue / Green gem in the universe, has been set on self
destruct, I honestly believe that this will be the death of life on Earth.

Pretty much any beach 15-20 miles from the Texas coastline is affected in some fashion. I'd suggest documenting the beaches nearest you first.
Unfortunately, the media isn't being too helpful in showing the most affected areas outside of a few major city coastlines. What I'd really like to
see is an up-to-date map of the spill...Anyone?

Well I have been planning a little trip like this for the last couple weeks. I had gotten this idea from a picture I had seen where a guy took any
standard plastic zip lock bag and just filled it with water. When he held it up to the light you could see oil in the water. So my plan was to go to
the nearest beach and do the same thing to see if I could find anything in the water.

HERE
is a map of Louisiana. I am located close to the Lake Charles area. As you can see it is inland, with some lakes and waterways around the area. Now if
you zoom in on the Lake Charles area and look west just a bit you will see a town called Sulphur. I will take hwy 27 in Sulphur and head straight
South into the Gulf. As I said before, it's about a 60 minute drive through some Gator country, and I will take a look around from that hwy 27 right
at the coast line and head East into Cameron.

I can not make any promises on Cameron though. I have no idea what I would be walking into in that area since last year it was pretty much wasted by
Hurricane Ike, but I will go in as far as possible.

Another poster asked about smelling oil in the air...well today there is a strange smell in the air, but I am not going to say for sure I smell oil.
In all fairness there are plenty of plants and factories as well as oil refineries in this area. Smells are fairly common on any given day, but I am
very much aware and looking for any changes and I will post if I can confirm anything. I will try to plan this trip for Sunday, but I can make no
promises. One thing I can promise is by Monday I will know for sure what the water is like in Galveston, Texas. Several friends are planning to go to
the beach in Galveston on Sunday, my buddy who will be going with me to the Gulf Coast may be going to Galveston, I don't know yet. If he doesn't
go, we will take our Gulf trip. If he does go, it will have to wait a few days, but I for sure will know what is up with Galveston's beaches on
Sunday and one of the guys who is going is going to do that plastic bag water check thing I mentioned earlier in this post lol. If anyone can think of
any other very easy to do type of experiments, please let me know.

There not Professional Cleaners, there anybody that applies who knows
how to use a mop and brush. And gets paid the same amount per hour
as the Garbo Man. Mmm, empty garbage cans or clean Toxic waste off
rocks without proper protection. I know which one I'd pick.

Originally posted by hawkiye
The government is worthless! People need to just start doing it themselves. All the farmers in the area that have extra hay and straw need to just
start taking down to the docks and the fishermen start taking it out and sopping up the oil. Also all the marshes they are so worried about just start
putting hay and straw in there and sopping up the oil.

Someone should set up a website and start recruiting people to ship thier hay down there and people with boats etc. to take out and soak up oil with
it. At least if it washes up on the beach it will be easy to pick up just like sea weed.

If we want this cleaned up we the people are going to have to do it and by-pass the incompetent worthless government. If I lived anywhere near the
area I would load up a pick up and trailer with hay and head for those marshes and just start doing it and maybe get some news outlets to cover it and
start the ball rolling and hope it caught on.

Ok so anyone live near there want to get the ball rolling?

Then get promptly arrested for for polluting the enviroment with dumping straw in the sea, and get put away for years ! Yep, surely the way to
go.............................

To be fair, do not think no one down here is doing anything to help. We are. The one thing that is really catching on is donating hair. Saloons,
barbers, average Joe's and Jane's are having their hair cut and the cut hair is being sent to a non profit group that is using the hair to make
booms to try to soak up the oil.

However, BP has decided that using hair booms is "not feasible" cause hair will also soak up some water and can sink. Nice huh? They will not even
allow the hair booms to be placed on the beaches to soak up oil coming on shore.

It drives me nuts watching some often comments on ATS. Especially the people who claim it is not that bad, or that oil leaks from the Gulf everyday
blah blah blah. From the guys I know who work off shore on the rigs, to the one guy I know who is a rescue diver and went out to help find the
missing. They all say the same 2 things to me.

It would need the entire population to shave their hair, thousands of times over and it would still not make a dent, it has to be stopped first. I
really think that they are happy to let people think that cutting their hair and donationg a bale of hay each would help, if it stood a chance of
working, they would be the first in the que for the photo op.

This is beyond casual volunteering for a few hours a week stuff, and who will refuse to treat any illnesses resulting from the feeble efforts of their
citizens, because we were not wearing full Hazmat suits at the time.

It is time to wake-up and smell the coffee !

After all there is a full scale invasion of Aliens coming next week, but they say that if we all cut our finger nails and throw them into the air, the
danger will be averted, Yeh right !

Originally posted by Cabaret Voltaire
OMG!!! Obama is a total commie bastard. A total liar. He is a manipulator. He is run by leftists with dual citizenship. Doesn't the public see this?
I can't believe he is still in office.

Believe it. There must be hundreds of people working behind the scenes to dig up dirt and scandal to rock B. Hussein O.'s world. He is only lucky. He
can't stay lucky for long.

Still I can not believe the American public is dumb enough to elect him. He is the WORST choice ever. He is obviously there for one reason and one
reason only.

I knew when I saw the coverage on TV that something was up. This tells me that if this was planned, then everything he said and the emotions he showed
were nothing but lies.

I did too. If he has spoken from an oil covered beach, maybe he would have been believable. But I have been watching this, and knew right off the
scene was faked. More lies, more propaganda. Where does it end?

What a joke,he would have been better off not to have done that,this is no time for tom-foolery, in todays world little underhanded tricks like this
are found out and exposed in short order and do much more harm than good.

I know many will find offence to this but its not time for beach clean-up anyway. Untill that well is capped any beach clean-up will just be wasted
effort as more will wash ashore before you can walk away. The clean-up must go like this, first stop the leak,second clean-up the gulf and lastly
clean-up the shoreline. Now every effort possible should be made to prevent oil from reaching the shore in the first place but in areas where this
fight has been lost, well those areas are dead, and will be for some time.

Originally posted by hawkiye
Someone should set up a website and start recruiting people to ship thier hay down there and people with boats etc. to take out and soak up oil with
it. At least if it washes up on the beach it will be easy to pick up just like sea weed.

Ok so anyone live near there want to get the ball rolling?

It is banned to the public to go to certain areas. Even US gov't is not interfering with helping using US Army corps on the cracks on the ocean
floor, and Bobby Jindal (LA Governor) had to get permission to put up a barrier (and didn't get the full length he asked for). Some out-of-work
fishermen know the areas of course and were helping on BP payroll, but BP did not give them respirators. I don't know how many people there were
total, but four of them went to the hospital with chest pains and shortness of breath, along with high blood pressure and headaches. I would imagine
it's not as simple as dumping hay on the shore or marches. The oil is not your regular oil as seen in that YT video. It's crude oil with some maybe
mixed with the dispersant. Once it's there, there must be a place for the crude oil hay to go. I doubt BP would allow joes from down south to help
out with their own methods anyway. If someone died, it would be a death on their clock.

They have their own "Unified Command" setup, and they have hired security guards from a company Wackenhut to secure a perimeter. source

That said, as I was looking at this NYTimes article, it is clearly what appears to be the case - that workers aren't cleaning up. In fact, looking at
the picture, everyone is just standing there perfectly clean. Of course they could have simply photographed them before instead of after or during,
but either way, it does tend to support the speculation that they might have only been there for the cameras.

(see link below) Pic is on the left-hand side as a thumbnail; just click it.

I also did hear, though, that BP was paying LA fishermen to clean up the spill, and that they got sick and were removed from the location to a
hospital for checkup. Symptoms included "nausea, high blood pressure, chest pain, headaches and shortness of breath." So, at least someone is trying
or tried to work to clean it up for sure, but they got sick. BP did not provide them with respirators and said that they were not needed.

Plutocracy, it seems. The worth of the company is greater than the US, so any hits should just go to Obama, who will just go down in history as a bad
President. So, it seems like BP is affording itself damage control.

Originally posted by nickoli
What a joke,he would have been better off not to have done that,this is no time for tom-foolery, in todays world little underhanded tricks like this
are found out and exposed in short order and do much more harm than good.

I know many will find offence to this but its not time for beach clean-up anyway. Untill that well is capped any beach clean-up will just be wasted
effort as more will wash ashore before you can walk away. The clean-up must go like this, first stop the leak,second clean-up the gulf and lastly
clean-up the shoreline. Now every effort possible should be made to prevent oil from reaching the shore in the first place but in areas where this
fight has been lost, well those areas are dead, and will be for some time.

Maybe it's possible to have our coasts protected and the Gulf cleaned at the same time. As it's been said by two people on this site, they are
signing papers stating they are working and then leaving to go home.

There are parts of the LA coast that are not damaged yet where people are still allowed to work, etc. It would be nice not to have those areas
polluted with crude oil if possible. Maybe you'd rather there not be a current so it would just all wash ashore in one spot, with all that compassion
and understanding you have.

Yes I agree every effort possible should be made to protect the shoreline and the marshes every effort from every possible source. My point is untill
the leak is stopped and the majority of the oil in the gulf contained/cleaned up beach clean-up will be a neverending job. Clean it up along comes
high tide deposits more clean it up again.

You people are so quick to attempt to destroy Obama every chance you get. None of you even speculated that BP hired these people to clean it up before
Obama got there, so that he wouldn't yank the authority from under them. BP is in control down there, not the government. If Obama saw that BP
wasn't doing a damn thing to clean up, he would have yanked control from BP and took it in the Governments own hands, even though that might not be a
bad idea, since BP clearly doesn't know what to do.

Thats weird, He made the statement a couple of days ago that the White House was in charge and has been calling the shots from the beginning.

President Barack Obama defensively and sometimes testily insisted on Thursday that his administration, not oil giant BP, was calling the shots in
responding to the worst oil spill in the nation's history.

"I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down," -president Obama

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